Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Book History at AJS

This blog grew out of a meeting held last year at the December 2007 meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies in Toronto. Although we are not convening a meeting this year at the conference to be held in a few weeks in Washington, our discussions last year and the informal networking that went on resulted in a number of sessions proposed with significant "history of the book" content. In addition, a number of sessions look to be of interest to readers of this blog.

3.2 JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN LEARNING DURING THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES:PARALLELS AND POINTS OF CONTACTChair: Martin I. Lockshin (York University)"The Process of Reading in Twelfth-Century Jewish and Christian Biblical Exegesis"Michael A. Signer (University of Notre Dame)"Tosafists, Cathedral Masters, and Their Critics"Ephraim Kanarfogel (Yeshiva University)"Jewish Knowledge of Christianity in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries"Daniel J. Lasker (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)"Echoes of the Eve/Mary Dichotomy in the Zohar"Sharon Koren (HUC-JIR)

3.3 RABBINIC REDACTORS AND THEIR READERSChair: Judith R. Baskin (University of Oregon)"Confusing the Heavenly and Human Fathers: Rabbinic Power and Powerlessness inBT Massekhet Ta’anit"Julia Watts Belser (Missouri State University)"In Front of the Text: Reading Self in Rabbinic Literature"Serguei Dolgopolskii (University of Kansas, Lawrence)"Literary Structure and Thematic Coherence in a Chapter of Bavli"Devora Steinmetz (Independent Scholar)"Jacob ibn Habib’s Critique of Medieval Intellectual Culture: A View of the Ein Yaakov through the Lens of the Talmud"Marjorie S. Lehman (Jewish Theological Seminary)